Pocketbook is Australia’s answer to Mint

Managing personal finances is a break out competitive space and there’s a new service on the block. Pocketbook is a way that you can track where your money goes, while skipping on the elaborate task of categorising transactions. Once you connect Pocketbook to your bank account (scary at first), it then digests your account transactions and automatically categorises them where possible.

You can always modify categories if Pocketbook got things wrong, or nominate items as bills and choose their frequency to refine the data. So once you have a nice picture of your financial position, what can you do with this data?

Below you’ll see a great break down (pie chart style) or which areas you’re hard earned dollars were spent on. As you spend money at Coles, it’s automatically allocated to groceries, as your monthly phone bill gets paid to Telstra, it’s placed under Utilities. Take a plane trip with Qantas, that’s straight into travel or buy something from Apple and it’s slotted into Tech.

So with the hard work done and a pretty visualisation, probably the best use for Pocketbook comes from its ability to highlight potential areas you can save. Those pesky $2-$2.50 ATM fees for example. Individually it doesn’t seem like much, but having them totalled for the month may be $30-$40 you could be saving.

After Mint.com launched for the US a couple of years ago, Australians have been searching for a local solution. Australian financial providers Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ, NAB and St George are all supported. It’s open to early testers at the moment, but the good news is we have some invites to give away – leave a comment and watch your inbox.

Pocketbook is the future of financial management, leveraging technology to save you money. Now we just need mobile apps for each platform to manage your money on the go.

Great to hear about your experiences with it so far! We’re just a few months old and have a full pipe-line of things to come. Hoping to make the experience for our users seamless.

Alvin from Pocketbook

jesseb05

I’d love an invite

http://techAU.tv techau

Thanks for hooking up the readers Bosco. Lots of new users coming your way.

http://twitter.com/jpeek James Peek

Looks very useful. However, I’m surprised none of the major banks have formalised their third-party authentication process into something more OAuth in style where you can grant (and consequently withdraw) varying levels of access to an account. As secure as these services maybe, it still feels “wrong” to be entering complete login details into a third-party site.

http://techAU.tv techau

Thanks Alvin. I had about 90% of my transactions auto categorised. Makes budgeting so much easier than running an excel spreadsheet.

http://techAU.tv techau

Throw me an email at Jason@techAU.tv if you used twitter to comment. Glad you’re all so keen..

http://techAU.tv techau

Completely agree James. It was certainly a big leap of faith to try it out.. that’s what I put on the line to try it out for you guys Their business, like Mint, is built on trust. I read the security page and believed what they said. The same back-end banks use and the password is hashed, so they never actually get it.

Guest

like!

Jayw

I’ve love an invite too…Have tried many services and seen a few come and go over the years…having seamless integration with the bank is the key to continued use including the smaller banks in australia. Great to see something tailored to australian banks for a change!

One concern. Why does the site have no information as to who is behind this? Trusting your bank details to a mystery company is worrying. Bosco is there any reason for not having detailed contact info on the site. ABN, audit info of your security protocols (ie who has access to my data, it says staff wont store data on insecure devices but can staff access my info?) etc

keen to dive in but if it all goes pear shaped I feel I have very little info to follow up on.

http://twitter.com/student154 Bosco Tan

Hi, we are so new that we haven’t had a chance to get those things in order. Feel free to email me. and perhaps these interviews both Alvin and I may help in the meantime http://fromlittlethings.co//?s=pocketbook

eltonlester

yes please

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=699198828 James Martin

Looks promising – Hopefully something that simplifies the job of keeping track of all the extra fees and charges added to so many purchases today. Would be great to try out.

Making the move to WP8 and I would like this to be the very first app I install. Finally a home grown app to support our banks. Very much looking forward to testing it out and giving you some constructive feedback.

http://www.facebook.com/michael.kindred Michael Kindred

looks interesting have been waiting for mint in Australia for a long time, still looks like it’s a while off.. would love an Invite to try this, have tried a couple other solutions like yodlee, xero and moneystands.

michael.kindred(at)outlook.com

John

Hey would love to try this

Ange

Is it too late to ask for an invite?

http://www.facebook.com/smoogle Nick M.V. Cooper

Nothing other than their security practices stops unfettered access. This is best fixed by a tiered or limited access system provided by the banks. I cannot imagine touching this with a 10ft pole otherwise

looks interesting have been waiting for mint in Australia for a long
time, still looks like it’s a while off.. would love an Invite to try
this, have tried a couple other solutions like yodlee, xero and
moneystands.

Musharuka

Hi, would like and invite to try. Have been waiting for mint to come to Aussie